rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
April 13, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I use speech recognition a great deal – and I recently switched to Windows Speech Recognition on Vista. And I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for Google Apps, because I think it offers superior performance for JavaScript apps.
Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR. According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).
Google: when are you going to put the effort into this? The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.
Rob Chambers: how easy is this really? You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.
So now, I’m using IE8. Google Docs with WSR works great there.
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, IE8, Microsoft, WSR
March 26, 2009 at 10:44 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I’ve been seeing lots of problems with Live Messenger connectivity lately. I see this message a lot:
I don’t ever want Live Messenger to interrupt my work with that dialog.
If connectivity fails, use a notification balloon, or better yet, do nothing. The red X on the tray icon already signifies trouble. Let me drill down to find out more info. This is a bad design decision.
If I dismiss the dialog, it will happen again. And if I don’t dismiss it? Well,
I left my machine from 9pm till 11am today and found my taskbar full:
Apparently Live Messenger thinks it is so important that I can’t connect that it needs to keep telling me. Or at least telling the task bar. This is a bug.
Live Messenger Team: Please fix this. I’m sure several of your myriad guidelines for Windows developers eschews any and all of this behavior.
Tags: Bug, Live, LiveMessenger, Microsoft, Windows
March 19, 2009 at 1:06 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
While the changes coming to SQL Data Services (SDS) are not exactly news, I wanted to weigh in on it.
I was familiar with SSDS before I knew anything about Red Dog Storage Azure Storage. When I found out about the latter, my initial concern was that Microsoft would confuse developers by offering two overlapping services. Such overlap isn’t too surprising considering that these two projects came out of competing parts of Microsoft. At the time, there was a pretty consistent message that SDS would someday support relational operations, but to me that meant they should hold off on SDS until that day came.
Microsoft often offers multiple technologies to solve specific problems — often this is a result of legacy technologies — in this case it seemed a shame to start off with such overlap.
Because of all this, I am very happy to see this clear differentiation between the Azure and SDS services. This is a good decision for Microsoft, Microsoft developers, and given the roadmap for SDS, an excellent decision for Microsoft’s enterprise customers.
Tags: Azure, Microsoft, RDBMS, SDS, SSDS
November 4, 2008 at 11:27 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Last Wednesday, while still at PDC2008, I did a quick podcast with Colin Steele of the Search IT Channel. From his introduction:
In this podcast, Microsoft developer Robert Anderson checks in from the Microsoft PDC 2008 in Los Angeles. Anderson, the chief technology officer for Microsoft partner Digipede Technologies in Oakland, Calif., says Windows Azure has a leg up on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, the Google App Engine and other cloud computing platforms. But when it comes to Windows 7, Microsoft has to do a lot more to move on from the “perceived failure” of Windows Vista.
Listen or download from here.
Tags: Azure, Microsoft, PDC, PDC2008, podcast, Windows7
October 28, 2008 at 11:02 am · Filed under .NET
David Treadwell announced the Live Framework at the PDC2008 this morning. Live Services is the collection of Live Messenger, Contacts, etc., plus Live Mesh. Live Framework is the set of APIs to program against Windows Live Services.
This is very cool stuff. There are two things here that I think are significant:
- A programmable synchronization platform.
- An application framework for installing/running applications across multiple devices.
This is very exciting stuff, but now back to my old saw.
I really want to see Live Framework go beyond Windows Mobile devices to every major mobile platform. This means the Apple, RIM, Google, Nokia platforms, etc.
My main reason? A major value proposition of Live Framework is phone device support. Duh. But, I don’t want to invest my time and data in Live Mesh applications if it comes with a lock-in to the Windows Mobile platform.
Given the discussion at a partner meeting yesterday about Windows Mobile, I think this will be a pretty common feeling.
Microsoft may not be able to make this happen, of course, but I hope they really try.
BTW: We interviewed David on Gillmor Gang 04.25.08 specifically talking about Live Mesh.
Tags: Live Mesh, Microsoft, PDC, PDC2008
October 28, 2008 at 9:46 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Recently I lauded the new name in my post, Windows 7? Right on! I led that post with
First of all let me say that I’m not that excited about the “Windows” part of Windows 7. I’m sure that will change when I see it later this month at the PDC.
A Microsoft guy not involved with the Windows team emailed me to tell me that his experience with Windows 7 is that it performs dramatically better.
That got me interested. And now I’ve seen it at PDC2008. Am I excited?
Well, not really. With Windows Vista I allowed my love for shiny new objects to drive some of my decisions. Windows 7 does have plenty of new — and cool — features. Some that struck me: some real improvements in Windows management (finally), create and mount VHDs, bitlocker on thumb drives, boot from VHDs, better multi-monitor and high DPI support, multi-monitor remote desktop,
These are all good things that make Windows better, but what I really care about is that it perform better and that the features can be used without killing performance. To this end, they have worked on reducing Windows memory footprint, reduced disk I/O for indexing, better power management, increase boot speed, device readiness and responsiveness
If Windows 7 enhances my productivity through performance and stability, then I can get excited.
Tags: Microsoft, PDC, PDC2008, Windows7
October 27, 2008 at 11:42 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Web 2.0
Microsoft’s long awaited cloud platform has finally been unveiled here at PDC 2008. Late to the Internet, Microsoft hit it hard. Late to the cloud, Microsoft is doing the same with Windows Azure. Happily, this will put an end to all the guessing about what Zurich, Red Dog, biztalk.net, SSDS, Live Mesh, etc., actually are.
Of course, now begins the discussion of how all these pieces fit together.
This is not a simple approach like Amazon’s EC2 or Google App Engine. Not to trivialize either, but they are certainly easier to understand. Try explaining them to the proverbial grandmother — no problem, especially if you leave out virtualization and pythons ;) (preemptive comment: I know AWS is much more than EC2 and that bigger and better things are coming from Google).
Regardless, the Microsoft Azure is multi-faceted. In typical Microsoft fashion, there is a lot for a developer to choose from:
- Azure Storage, Management, and Compute. Run WCF/ASP.NET based services, with work queues and data storage.
- Microsoft .NET Services, nee biztalk.net (wrote about here). This gives you an Internet Service Bus, Access Control, and Workflow Services. Messages and workflow in the cloud connecting other cloud and enterprise offerings. Very big deal.
- Microsoft SQL Services, nee SQL Server Data Services or SSDS. Eventually a relational model in the sky, currently not too different from Azure Storage.
- Live Services: Not too much detail on this today, but this is clearly what was “Live Mesh”: a rich synchronization framework, “live operating environment” for writing applications to across the Web and on user’s devices.
- Windows Live (Live Office, Live Sharepoint, Live Dynamics CRM, etc). In-cloud applications extensible by partners and users with in-cloud and in-premises solutions.
It all does fit together, and will be of immediate value to developers. As Marc Jacobs of Lab49 said to me afterward,
We could make use of all of these services today.
Damned straight. It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner.
This last point is an important one. Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud. While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit.
Taking this all together — not forgetting Microsoft’s leading developer productivity story — it looks like a home run to me.
Tags: .NET, Azure, Microsoft, PDC, PDC2008, Reddog, Zurich
October 19, 2008 at 11:20 am · Filed under .NET
I’m going to the PDC.
I am mostly excited to hear about how all Microsoft’s cloud + parallel programming + distributed computing story all fits together. And hopeful that it really does all fit together.
I’m interested in hearing more about Windows 7, but I’m not that excited about it.
As in all conferences, 99% of the value is in meeting and hanging out with people. If you are going too and want to meet up, let me know.
email me: robert at digipede dot net.
Tags: Microsoft, PDC, PDC2008
October 13, 2008 at 10:12 pm · Filed under .NET
First of all let me say that I’m not that excited about the “Windows” part of Windows 7. I’m sure that will change when I see it later this month at the PDC.
I have a long history as a Windows user. In fact, I have Windows 1 sitting on my desk. Actually, these are installation floppies for the Microsoft Windows Operating Environment.
I have disliked the Windows product naming convention since Windows 95. That should have been Windows 4.0 with some extra designation to distinguish it from NT. Since then, the naming of Windows versions has been absurd.
I’m thrilled that the next one is called Windows 7. I hope this is the end of the trend of seemingly arbitrary names interspersed by release years. If the subsequent name isn’t 7.x or 8, however, this will actually just have been worse then calling it 2010.
Tags: Microsoft, PDC, Windows, Windows7
September 4, 2008 at 9:58 am · Filed under Grid Computing, Web 2.0
Google releases a new browser. The world declares “browser war” with some apprehension and relish. Web developers are cringing because browser compatibility is a major source of effort, cost, and frustration for software developers.
Q. Why would Google do this to us? Just to take away Microsoft browser share?
A. No.
Q. Are they doing this to extend the “Google OS” to the desktop in a way they control?
A. Probably, but that isn’t even their first concern.
Q. So, what is going on?
A. Well, I’m glad you asked.
Google is working to make their JavaScript-view of the Web as powerful as possible. This makes sense given their enormous investments in JavaScript and in their own application suite.
Contrary to the approaches of Microsoft and Adobe with their Rich Internet Applications (RIA) frameworks, Google has focused on JavaScript. Where Microsoft and Adobe are building a better user experience inside of a container, Google is creating a better user experience through dynamic HTML and AJAX techniques.
Their developer model includes building out tooling to make it easier to author AJAX applications. This includes the efforts made in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to enable modern IDE tooling for AJAX development. This allows developers to build maintainable object-oriented applications (in Java) that get converted and optimized to JavaScript. Plus it promises cross-browser compatibility.
On the client side, they have Google Gears to enable local storage, improved caching support, and offline mode.
Q. So what have they been missing? A browser?
A. Not exactly. They’ve been missing a JavaScript client runtime engine.
Google has made great advances in AJAX application development and tooling, but they have had to rely on others to provide reliability, responsiveness, performance, etc.
And that is what Chrome is about: taking control of the runtime engine for Google applications. This makes the Google applications way more compelling. More specifically, Chrome is about delivering that engine. As Google says, they would love it if other browsers adopt the engine too. I buy that.
Of course, by that time Chrome will be differentiated from its JavaScript engine. By then Chrome will be about the Google OS.
Tags: Adobe, Chrome, Flash, Google, JavaScript, Microsoft, Silverlight
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